A Vacation Photo Workflow with Lightroom

by Jeff Bondono

I recently wanted a super-duper photo backup strategy for a vacation. My requirements were to:
  1. backup the photos from my SD card daily
  2. format my camera's SD cards as needed for space tomorrow
  3. be able to caption my photos each day so I'd be able to easily identify them later
  4. be able to develop a photo or two per day
  5. easily import the photos to my desktop computer when I returned home, without losing the work I'd done during the vacation.
Here's what worked for me. First, the preparations on my laptop before leaving home:
  1. I made sure Lightroom Classic still worked on my laptop, that my Adobe License was still active on that version (Adobe lets you use your license on 2 different machines)
  2. Plugged a 2 TB SSD into a USB port, and commanded Lightroom (File --> New Catalog) to create a new catalog on that SSD. That was the catalog I used during vacation.
  3. I packed my laptop, its power supply, a USB SD card reader, a couple USB Thumbdrives, and that 2 TB SSD. I wish I'd taken a mouse, but the trackpad worked "marginally OK" for my simple needs.
Each day during the vacation I did this:
  1. Plugged the SSD and the USB card reader into the laptop, ran Lightroom (using the catalog on the SSD), imported all photos from the SD card onto that SSD.
  2. As energy permitted, I did whatever edits I wanted, adding keywords and captions, rating photos, creating collections - all the things I'd usually do at home!
  3. Closed Lightroom, letting it backup the catalog (the backup was saved on the SSD drive)
  4. Inserted a USB Thumbdrive into the laptop and copied that day's photo folder and that day's catalog backup to the Thumbdrive. That copy was just a disaster recovery in case the SSD died.
  5. Put the SD card back into my camera and formatted it for tomorrow.
When I returned home, I did this on my desktop:
  1. Plugged the SSD into my desktop, ran Lightroom, opened the catalog that's on the SSD (File --> Open Catalog), and, within the Library module's Folders panel, looked for a folder which had a question-mark on it, meaning that Lightroom couldn't find the folder, in this case, because the SSD's drive letter was different on my desktop vs laptop. (This probably doesn't ever happen on a Mac.) I right-clicked the folder, chose Find Missing Folder, and navigated to the drive and folder name where that folder existed on the SSD. That fixed Lightroom's pointer to that folder and all its files. I did this for all of the missing folders.
  2. Switched back to my main catalog (File --> Open Recent, and picked my normal desktop catalog)
  3. Selected File --> Import from Another Catalog
  4. Navigated to the folder containing the vacation catalog on the external SSD drive, selected the lrcat file and clicked Choose.
  5. In the Import from Catalog dialog, checked "All Folders" at the top. In the File Handling field, picked "Copy new photos to a new location and import". If my normal import folder did not show in the Copy To field, clicked the Choose button and picked my normal import folder.
  6. Clicked Import.
  7. All my vacation photos were copied into my main catalog and onto my main desktop drive, along with all the developing, captioning, etc. that I did during the vacation. I unplugged the SSD and continued using Lightroom as normal.